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Ukip Leader Nigel Farage leaves by his Brexit Bus from Clacton-on-Sea in Essex after campaigning ahead of the EU referendum vote. PAimages/Nick Ansell. All rights reserved.

In
the early 2000s, researching my first book, I interviewed groups of
taxi-drivers in various regional cities of Britain, Germany and the Czech
Republic to get a sense of their views on political Europe. What might these
people, away from the centres of political and economic power, have to say
about the problems of public life, the workings of institutions, and by
extension the European Union?

If
there was one overriding theme to emerge, it was a sense of impotence before socio-economic
forces. With an air of fatalism, though not with indifference, participants
evoked a world of problems without solutions, of politicians unable or
unwilling to make a difference, and of institutions that were symptoms rather
than sources of address, detached from ordinary concerns. Such views were most
pronounced on matters of economics, and the EU stood as their emblem.

As a
driver called Luke in the Welsh town of Swansea recalled, combining such
themes, ‘I picked a guy up at the station … he works for the government and
he’s working on the euro at the moment, and he has said that we will definitely
be in the euro. Definitely be in the euro within five years, without a shadow
of a doubt. He said, if it goes to a referendum, if they say no, we will be going into the euro, everything
will be fixed. “We will be in the euro”, he said, “I’m working on it now.”’[1]

Such
sentiments of impotence in the face of the inevitable are a widespread trope of
the age, I believe. They express an experience characteristic of contemporary European
citizenship, and probably of citizenship more widely. At least since the early
1990s, the real-world constraints on political authority in the neoliberal era,
coupled with narratives of globalisation that insist politics must bend to the
imperatives of the market, combined with each other to evoke a world of weak political
agency. Governments of the period would typically emphasise the limits to what politics could achieve on
the traditionally salient questions, and would call on individuals to adapt to change
rather than seek to author it.

Nowhere were such ideas stronger than in
connection with the EU, but they were hardly exclusive to the transnational
sphere. The disavowal of political agency, and its practical fragmentation
across private and technocratic institutions, was central to the spirit of the times.
The effect, one may assume, was to weaken popular allegiance to institutions at
both European and national level, as well as to mediating entities such as
parties. Where decision-makers are thought to have little power to improve
things, there is little reason to give support or to oppose them, and every
reason to disengage.

“Take
back control” was the message of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Against a
background sentiment of powerlessness, augmented from 2008 by austerity
programmes administered as necessary responses to crisis, who in retrospect could
be surprised by the appeal of this type of message. In a world experienced as
one of out-of-control forces, all the more irresistible at the transnational
level, how welcome for many would be the promise to reassert control. With its
focus on a series of simple, ‘doable’ steps – diverting funds to the NHS, reinforcing
borders – the Leave campaign cast itself as the only political group willing to
take decisive action, while others stressed only what one could ill afford to
do.

The
Brexit referendum has been widely interpreted as an expression of right-wing populism
– but what exactly is populism? If we leave aside polemical uses of the term, referring
simply to a politics deemed irresponsible, then typically it refers to a number
of features: an anti-elitist stance, a hostility to political procedures, an
insistence on the category of ‘the people’, and an anti-pluralist assertion
that the good of the people is incontestable.[2]

These are all important features, and all were evident in the Brexit campaign –
but just as important, I suggest, is that populism entails the promise of
agency. It presents itself as a politics of action – of recognising problems
where they exist and of tackling them. Populists present themselves – and
usually themselves personally, rather than as cogs in the machinery of state or
party – as those who will act on the people’s will, as those who will ‘take
control’. Though this promise of agency is neither historically nor
conceptually unique to populism, it becomes one of its sources of appeal in the
wider context of a disavowal of agency by other leading actors of the political
sphere.

Those
warming to such messages need not believe that those uttering them will do much
to make their lives better. The substantive goals of populism may be vaguely
defined, and even when clear they may be objectionable to parts of the very
constituency of support they elicit. Those for whom the fatalism runs deep may
doubt whether even the agents of populism can achieve all that much (and may
feel comfortable supporting them precisely for that reason).

But credible to
their audience or not, such invitations to ‘take back control’ stand as
forthright statements of intent, of vitality and a certain ambition. The point
they convey is that here, finally, someone is willing to show a finger towards
a world where all is said to be inevitable.

There
is a contrast to be made in this regard not just with the parties of centre-left
and centre-right who have spent two decades emphasising their impotence before global
forces, but also with the figures of technocracy.
Technocrats, one may generalise, are no less inclined to disavow their agency. This
may seem surprising: has not the pattern of EU politics in recent years been
that of such individuals stepping forward to demonstrate their capacity to take
decisive measures? What of Draghi at the
ECB, or Monti at the head of the Italian government – or for that matter the guy
in the back of Luke’s cab, working on hooking up Britain to the euro: are they
not figures of agency just as much as the populist?

Only
in the weak sense of actors responding to putative necessity. Whether in the
guise of experts responding to the dictates of scientific reason – as central
bankers generally, and those of the ECB especially, have tended to cast
themselves – or more recently as crisis managers, bringing emergency know-how
to the handling of a grave situation, the non-majoritarian agencies of the EU
space generally present themselves as doing what has to be done.

However
powerful and discretionary they may be, such figures are most comfortable when presenting
themselves as the handmaidens of necessity. They avoid at all cost the
suggestion they are acting of volition, with the added burdens of
accountability this would demand. For the same reason they do little to inspire
popular allegiance. It is not just that such leaders are unelected and weakly
tied to anything that might pass for public opinion: they make no promise of
agency, indeed actively disavow it.

Again,
populism, and the animating current of the Brexit referendum, is quite different.
The emphasis is on an expression of will – on ‘our’ deciding what is important
and should be done, and on repudiating establishment notions of necessity. A
rejection of discourses of the inevitable was, I suggest, a significant underlying
theme in the famous statement of Leave campaigner Michael Gove MP that ‘people in
this country have had enough of experts’. Indeed, in the populist outlook there
is typically an impatience to get started (‘Invoke Article 50 now!’), and to
simplify procedures so that agency can be exercised more directly.

I
do not wish to suggest that the promise of agency attached to populism is necessarily
a credible one. I do not want to suggest that Brexit necessarily holds real
possibilities for the restoration of agency in a way that responds to popular
concerns. (Nor, incidentally, do I want to suggest that all support for Brexit
is well described by the term populism.) The promise of agency may be
insincere, and may pose little real threat to the economic structures that feed
these concerns.

Just as the technocrat may disguise the real discretion they
exercise, the populist may talk the language of change while consolidating the
worst aspects of the status quo. The key point is how these developments
highlight the predicament the EU has found itself in. Long regarded by many of
its citizens as symptomatic of a world of out-of-control forces, as one more
source of powerlessness, its critique – and conceivably its undoing – comes in
the form of an appeal to the desire for agency. There is no reason to assume
this holds only of Britain.

The
mutations of the EU in its recent years of crisis have done little to change
this state of affairs – indeed, they may have compounded it. To be sure, the
decision-making of the EU has become more visible, also more prone to critical
evaluation. There is a degree of ‘politicisation’ – but also ever more
strenuous efforts to depoliticise it once more. In addition to the prevalence
of emergency discourse that frames everything the EU does as a response to
necessity, its policy regimes seem increasingly geared to system stability and automaticity
of decision.

Whether one looks at the economic rules designed to maintain the Eurozone
or the formulas by which refugee flows are to be managed, the apparent aim is
to create unchanging rules that more or less apply themselves. Quite aside from
their substantive effects, such policy regimes reaffirm the image of the EU as
self-referential, as a set of mechanisms that carry on regardless. Reasons to
give allegiance to such a system, and to take advantage of whatever
opportunities for participation it does afford, are all the thinner for it.

If
the disavowal of political agency is one of the enduring failings of the
European political space, its constructive resolution will depend on political
figures other than just right-wing populists emerging to propose consequential
interventions in the socio-economic sphere. A world of forces that resist positive
human influence is one that leaves political institutions without a rationale.

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